Husbands and wives take a good deal for granted, and it is more curious that lovers, who are bound by no such tie, often meet with shipwreck on exactly the same sort of dangers. To be too exacting is probably, of all causes, the most fertile in parting devoted lovers.
But enough of speculation. Pardon my homily, and let me answer your question. You ask me what has become of the man we used to see so constantly, sitting in the Park with a married lady who evidently enjoyed his society. I will tell you, and you will then understand why it is that you have not seen him since that summer when we too found great satisfaction in each other’s company. He was generally “about the town,” and when not there seemed rather to haunt the river. Small blame to him for that; there is none with perceptions so dead that the river, on a hot July day, will not appeal to them. I cannot tell how long afterwards it was, but the man became engaged to a girl who was schooling or travelling in France. She was the sister of the woman we used to see in the Park. Un bel giorno the man and his future sister-in-law started for the Continent, to see his fiancée. Arrived at Dover, the weather looked threatening, or the lady wanted rest, or it was part of the arrangement—details of this kind are immaterial—anyhow, they decided to stay the night in an hotel and cross the following morning. In the grey light which steals through darkness and recoils from day, some wanderer or stolid constable saw a white bundle lying on the pavement by the wall of the hotel. A closer examination showed this to be the huddled and shattered body of a man in his night-dress; a very ghastly sight, for he was dead. It was the man we used to see in the Park, and several storeys above the spot where he was found were the windows, not of his room, but of another. I do not know whether the lady continued her journey; but, if she did, her interview with her sister must have been a bad experience.
XIV
BY THE SEA
YOU asked me to paint you a picture—a picture of a wonderful strand half-circling a space of sunlit sea; an island-studded bay, girt, landwards, by a chain of low blue hills, whose vesture of rich foliage is, through all the years, mirrored in the dazzling waters that bathe those rocky feet. The bay is enclosed between two headlands, both lofty, both rising sheer out of the sea, but that on the north juts out only a little, while the southern promontory is much bolder, and terminates a long strip of land running at right angles to the shore out into very deep water.
The beach between these headlands forms an arc of a circle, and the cord joining its extremities would be about seven miles in length, while following the shore the distance is nearly ten miles.
One might search east or west, the Old World or the New, and find in them few places so attractive as this little-known and sparsely inhabited dent in a far Eastern coast.
Here the sky is nearly always bright; a day which, in its thirteen hours of light, does not give at least half of brilliant, perhaps too brilliant sunshine, is almost unknown. Then it is the sunshine of endless summer, not for a month or a season, but for ever.
Except on rare occasions, the winds from the sea are softest zephyrs, the land breezes are cool and fragrant, sufficient only to stir the leaves of trees and gently ruffle the placid surface of the bay.